Become a doctor

Getting top marks in law school and a “marquee” LL.M. from Harvard, Yale, Cambridge or Oxford can help you land a university job, but having a doctoral degree is even more impressive. “the LL.M. doesn’t really deepen one’s research skills,” Holloway says. A doctorate primes you for doing research that has real scope and depth.

Find a niche

Following your passions is important, but so is becoming an expert in an in-demand field of legal academia. “International human rights candidates are ten a penny. Yet try to find a candidate in the area of corporate finance or tax law! They are as scarce as hen’s teeth.” It’s also hard to find serious scholars in criminal and family law.

Clerk

It isn’t necessary to have a clerkship under your belt, but completing one at an appellate court in your province — or better still, under a Supreme Court judge with the SCC — can prove to be résumé gold. “I personally found my own to be of tremendous value,” Holloway says.

Practice

Teaching law doesn’t require you to have actually worked as a lawyer beforehand. However, Holloway recommends experiencing the law firm lifestyle: “I can’t imagine being able to teach law in a meaningful way without having a sense of how the law actually works as a system, and how it impacts on the lives of regular people. That’s why I consider my time in practice to have been one of the most important parts of my academic training.”